Many people lack a factual understanding of events in our region because the media report them inadequately. We blog here because our daughter Malki, murdered at the age of 15 in a restaurant massacre in Jerusalem, was a victim of jihadist hatred and barbarism. For jihadism and terrorism to end in Israel, New York, Madrid, London and everywhere else, people first need to understand the scale on which it is happening and why. This ongoing war is killing us.

Monday, July 23, 2012

23-Jul-12: Dr Jihad: "No chemical or biological weapons will ever be used by Syria, and I repeat, will never be used, during the crisis" except...

Syrian despot al-Assad and family: Don't ignore the photo above, but know that the story it illustrates
is about as far from heart-warming as stories get. [Image Source] And Dr Jihad actually exists.

The Foreign Ministry of the
disintegrating Syrian
Arab Republicfound time
today to hold a press conference.

The country is in the midst of a bloodbath that speaks more
eloquently than any press conference ever could about the reality of getting in the path of one of the last remaining, old-style murderous despots. We only know about this via non-traditional channels. Syria's ongoing street killings, the daily massacres, get media coverage because
of the easy access that embattled participants themselves have to YouTube,
Twitter and similar channels that barely existed a decade ago. Conventional
media reporting in which foreign correspondents are accredited to Syria and get
access to government representatives and public events? Forget it. In
its 2011 annual table, Reporters
Without Borders described Syrian "freedom of the press"
thus:

"Total censorship, widespread
surveillance, indiscriminate violence and government manipulation made it
impossible for journalists to work" in Syria last year, which fell to
176th position in the index.

But today they held a media conference at the
Foreign Ministry in Damascus. We know that Al Jazeera sent a representative because
theyphotographed
and reported it. They had some revealing things
to say which, it's far to assume, the Syrians wanted us to know:

At the foreign
ministry media conference,the
Syrian government acknowledged for the first time that it possessed stockpiles
of chemical and biological weaponsand
said it will only use them in case of a foreign attack and never internally
against its own citizens. "No chemical or biological weapons will
ever be used, and I repeat, will never be used, during the crisis in Syria no
matter what the developments inside Syria," spokesman Makdissi
said. "All of these types of weapons are in storage andunder security and the direct
supervision of the Syrian armed forcesand
will never be usedunless
Syria is exposed to external aggression." [Source]

Dr Jihad addresses the media conference in Damascus today. Screen shot of the official Syrian site [Image Source]

We will write
again, separately, about those last words. They seem to be crafted to
specifically address Israel. Meanwhile, back to Syria.

The uniquely well-named spokesperson for the
collapsing House of al-Assad today wasJihadMakdissi PhD. It was Dr. Jihad who took the stage to explain just how very
interested the Syrians are in hearing their Arab League colleagues suggest
that Bashar al-Assad should give up power:

"We are sorry that the Arab League has descended to this
level concerning a member state of this institution... This decision
[presumably, whether or not al-Assad goes] only concerns the Syrian people, who
are the sole masters of fate of their governments. If the Arab nations who met in Doha were honest about wanting to stop
the bloodshed they would have stopped supplying arms... they would stop their
instigation and propaganda... All their statements are
hypocritical."

In the official Syrian government version of the media event [here],
Dr. Jihad offered some creative
observations about what it euphemistically termed "recent events taking
place in some of Damascus neighborhoods".

"It is clear
that the Syrian army is defending the Syrians and that we are in state of
self-defense. There might be clashes in certain areas butthe security situation is much more
better."

Could it be getting "much more better"
because the al-Assad regime's men are now finally openly flaunting those
weapons of proven mass destruction? Syria's chemical strategy worked
wonderfully well for them in1982. The notorious
chemical massacre at Hama costtens of thousands of Syrian lives,
butin Wikipedia's words, it "ended the campaign begun in 1976 by Sunni Islamic groups,
including the Muslim Brotherhood, against Assad's regime".

"Much more better" than that,
the junior al-Assad could hardly hope to achieve.

Dr. Jihad went on todayto
explain why the world should trust the Syrians on this chemical/biological
weapons issue.

...We are defending ourselves. If
there are such weapons, they are for defending Syria against external
aggression. Any military person knows that such weapons can't be used in a
guerilla warfare." On the possibility
of a comprehensive war taking place in the region in case Israel decided to
bombard the sites of the chemical weapons in Syria, Makdissi said "Don't
ask a diplomat about a war option, I don't talk about a war and, God's willing,
there will not be a war."

Accompanying the extraordinary pictures, the
Telegraph's Nick Meo ["Family photo album reveals Assad private life"] offers
some of the most devastating understated commentary on the Syrian situation to
have emerged in recent months:

Most parents would want to safeguard
a young family - and many other Syrians, of all political hues, have already
done exactly that by fleeing the country, or making plans to leave.
It is one of the more contradictory facts about the couple who have presided
over 18 months of bloody repression of their people - with Mr Assad ordering
the arrest, detention and torture of thousands of his own compatriots, or
sending tanks to shell rebel villages indiscriminately - that they have tried
to preserve the nearest thing possible to a normal family life.
They were never an ordinary family, with their palaces, private jets and
billion dollar fortune. But now photographs have emerged - apparently taken for
propaganda reasons - showing in intimate detail how they led an apparently warm
family life, one to which it may never now be possible to return...
The photographs, from Mrs Assad's private collection, were handed to a foreign
friend in Damascus before the uprising started in the spring of last year. They
are believed to have been taken between five and seven years ago in Syria,
probably by a professional photographer, and appear intended to portray the
family as happy, normal and modern. Their cosy intimacy looks too natural to be
have been staged.Unseen by the photographer, and by most visitors to Syria, were the torture
chambers, tanks and chemical weapons that the family relied on to maintain
their brutal rule.
Also unseen among the photographs of Hafez, now aged 10, with his sister,
eight-year-old Zein, and their brother Karim, now seven, are images of those
less fortunate Syrian children who have died in the course of the uprising:
some blown apart in artillery barrages against rebellious suburbs, others
slaughtered in their villages by loyalist Shabiha militia who cut their throats
in vengeful rampages.

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This Ongoing War: About this blog

Many people lack a factual understanding of events in our region because the media often report them inadequately. Our daughter Malki, murdered at the age of 15 in a restaurant massacre in Jerusalem, was a victim of jihadist hatred and barbarism. For jihadism and terrorism to end in Israel, in New York, in Madrid, in London and everywhere else, people first need to understand the scale on which it is happening. This ongoing war is killing us.